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Lake Ōkareka - this small and little-visited lake is a place of much charm, surrounded by hills nearly everywhere thickly wooded. It is quite near, but out of sight from the tourist motor route of Rotorua and Tarawera; a side road gives access to it. Anglers find good sport there, but otherwise its solitude is not disturbed yet. Many years ago a settler acquired some of the land around it, and built his house on a low-lying isthmus which connects an island-like hill in the middle of the lake with the mainland. Some of the frontage is still in private hands, but the greater part of the sylvan basin in which the lake lies has now become residential property.
Ōkareka means "the lake of sweet food". In early times, Māori grew sweet potatoes or kumara around the outside of the lake. Lake Ōkareka was first described in print by Sir George Grey, and poetic mention of it is made by Domett in his “Ranolf and Amohia.” Grey visited it on the course of his travels through the Lakes Country to Taupo in the summer of 1849-50. The journey is described in that rare little book entitled “Journal of an expedition Overland from Auckland to Taranaki”, written for the Governor by his secretary G. S. Cooper, with a translation into Maori by his interpreter, Piri-kawau; the book was published in Auckland in 1851. In those days the route from Ōhinemutu to Tarawera was a track which skirted the shore of Ōkareka and reached the large lake near the mission station called Kariri (Galilee). It was a blistering hot day when Governor Grey and his party took the foot trail from Rotorua to Tarawera, and the narrator says they were “nearly stewed”. “We reached the beautiful lake of Ōkareka,” the journal entry for 27th December 1849, runs, “just at a place where there is a spring of deliciously cool water, wherewith we all refreshed ourselves and then proceeded to cross the lake in canoes. The lake is really an extremely pretty sight, the shores being lofty and wooded, with the exception of a valley at each end, where the roads run. A peninsula, on which stands the pa called Taumaihi, juts out into the centre of the lake. The waters are beautifully clear, and very deep. There is no apparent outlet to this lake. Its vent consists of an underground stream, which is hidden for about half a mile, and then makes its appearance, looking like a fountain, gushing through a heap of rocks and square stones of a basaltic formation, whence it makes its way in a small stream to Tarawera, the level of which is about sixty feet lower than that of Ōkareka, and into which the water falls down a declivity of twenty feet, forming a beautiful cascade, surrounded and overshadowed by a clump of karaka and other evergreen trees.” In those days the shores of Ōkareka were a scene of Maori life; there were cultivations on the waterside, and the natives fished the waters for whitebait, the koura crayfish, and the little fish called toitoi, which abounded there before the Pakeha trout was introduced. In the ‘sixties Alfred Domett visited Ōkareka and Tarawera by the track Grey took, and we have a picture of the little forest lake in his romantic poem: Wooded Ōkareka
That mocks you with deceitful mien. By loving cliffs encompassed round - Fair captive, so resigned, serene. Lulled in a seeming sleep profound; Yet all the while slips off unseen In secret diving underground. And he describes its outburst into open day “all flash and foam,” in contrast to the glassy water of the lake. Some of the most beautiful forest in New Zealand is in this reserve, extending to the lofty western side of Lake Ōkataina and the Whakapoungakau Range.
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